Industrial process control and automation systems are often used to automate large and complex industrial processes. In conventional control and automation systems, industrial process controllers receive measurements from sensors and generate control signals for actuators. Some of these controllers can implement model predictive control (MPC) or other forms of advanced process control (APC).
Advanced process control is used in various industries, such as to drive complex systems so that the systems operate at or near their limits and deliver operational performance and economic benefits to customers. Sustaining the performance of APC process controllers over time can be useful or important for realizing the benefits that these applications promise. As a result, APC monitoring by human operators is often needed in order to maintain an industrial process (or a portion thereof) at optimum conditions.